Power Systems Engineer Salary 2026,
What Power Systems Engineers Actually Earn

How much do power systems engineers make in 2026?

Power systems engineering has no separate BLS occupation, so the wage row here is the electrical engineer series: OEWS May 2025 gives the SOC 17-2071 national median as $120,630 a year ($58.00 an hour), with the bottom 10% near $76,550 and the top 10% at $184,300. That code pools power engineers with semiconductor, electronics and product engineers, so say plainly that the figure describes electrical engineering broadly. Where power systems engineers sit inside it is being reshaped by a supply problem. Utilities, developers and consultants all need engineers who can run load flow, short-circuit and protection coordination studies, model transient stability, and take projects through interconnection — and there are not enough of them, because power specialisms lost enrolment for two decades while the utility engineering workforce aged toward retirement. The result is that experienced power systems engineers with real study and interconnection experience command the upper half of this band, while newly graduated engineers still start near the lower quartile. Employer type matters too: consultants and independent power producers pay above utilities on salary, and utilities answer with pension value, stability and lower hours. Employment is projected to grow 7.2% through 2034 with roughly 11,700 openings a year. → Full power systems engineer career guide, career path, credentials & placement →

Note: $120,630 blends every experience level and every setting in this occupation. For pay by level alone, see Pay by Level below.

Published (BLS): BLS OEWS May 2025, SOC 17-2071, United States national estimate. Public, methodologically rigorous, but sampled on a rolling 3-year basis and published ~10 months after collection — so it reflects wages that are already 1–2 years old by the time you read them.

Level and certification medians: distributed across the published BLS percentile range for this SOC code (P10 through P90) according to the credential tiers this occupation actually hires at. They are modeled reference points, not separately surveyed wages.

State and metro figures: modeled — the BLS national median multiplied by the GlobalCybers state wage index, and for metros by the published metro index for that state. They are estimates of local pay, not BLS state or metropolitan-area observations, and are labelled as modeled in the tables below.

No verified placement sample:GlobalCybers does not yet publish a placement median for this role, so no "verified" figure appears anywhere on this page.

Full site methodology & data sources →